Before Miss Seymour could respond to that, Stephen heard the kitchen door open and a maid’s exclamation of surprise cut hastily short. He didn’t turn. “Is that satisfactory?” he asked.
“It will be, for the moment,” Miss Seymour said.
“Good.” Stephen did turn, then, and faced the maid. A moment’s fumbling brought him a name. “Polly, this is Miss Seymour, my new secretary. Kindly find an appropriate room for her. Miss Seymour, make yourself at home as much as you can.”
“And my things?”
“We’ll retrieve them tomorrow,” he said, and stood to leave.
Six
Polly, a short blonde girl who looked a little younger than Mina herself, stood silent for a moment after Lord MacAlasdair departed. From the way she chewed on her lower lip and the way her gaze shifted between Mina and the middle distance, she was trying to figure out whether the house evenhadan appropriate room. MacAlasdair had said he didn’t entertain often. He also didn’t keep that many servants, clearly, and “secretary” was an odd position, somewhere between the two.
Not to mention that Polly, unless she was averytrusting soul indeed, had to doubt that “secretary” was Mina’s real role.
Mina bit back the urge to say anything—Polly wouldn’t believe it, anyway—and tried not to blush.
Finally, the maid sucked in air through her teeth and nodded to herself. “Wait here, please, miss,” she said, and took herself off, leaving Mina alone in the dimly lit kitchen.
As she’d done before when Lord MacAlasdair had left to seek a doctor, she folded her hands in her lap and made herself sit still, taking slow, deep breaths. Panic would help nothing, she reminded herself. Fretting would help nothing; anger would help nothing. She was where she was.
And the shadows in the corners weren’t moving this time. She kept checking.Thatwasn’t panic. That was just reasonable caution, although MacAlasdair wouldn’t have left her alone with Polly if he thought the manes could come back. On the other hand, he hadn’t exactly anticipated them the first time.
She jumped and squeaked when she heard footsteps in the hall. Luckily—God bless wooden floors and hard-soled boots—she had enough warning to collect herself before Polly opened the door again. “This way, miss. If you please.”
Polly led Mina through some of the same halls she’d run down earlier but turned well before the passage that led to the locked room. Instead, she took Mina up two flights of stairs, casting curious glances at her all the time when she didn’t think Mina was looking.
No wonder. One didn’t hire secretaries in the middle of the night, particularly not female secretaries, who hardly anyone hired anyhow. Polly must have known by now that she was working for an eccentric; all the same, she must have had a dozen questions. Mina might have heard some of them if MacAlasdair had hired her as a maid, or even a housekeeper. However, secretaries, like governesses, were always a little apart from the servants.
It was too bad. If Mina had met the other girl under any other circumstance, they could have been friendly. Perhaps they could even have been friends. She would have liked to have a friend in this house.
The room was a neat, sparse little place with dark wooden furniture and pale flowered wallpaper, clearly not a room for family or guests but also a few steps above Mina’s regular lodgings. She guessed that it had been for one of the more senior servants, perhaps a lady’s maid from a time when the house had had a mistress.
Polly waited in the doorway, and for a moment, Mina couldn’t figure out why, or why the girl didn’t say anything. Then she remembered more of Alice’s stories: maids didn’t speak until spoken to. That was true even with a secretary, she supposed.
She cleared her throat. “That’ll be all, Polly,” she said, keeping her voice as clipped and even as she ever had. “Thank you.”
The maid nodded and departed, leaving Mina alone in the room.
She took a more careful look around, noticing a small window set high on the wall. The view out of it was gorgeous, though the night was cloudy. Mina could see the outlines of the London roofs, lit against the sky by the still-awake city below, and the dome of Saint Paul’s rising above them.
Turning reluctantly back to the room itself, she had to admit that it wasn’t at all bad. As far as she could see, there was no evidence of spiders or rats, nor any dust. The air was a little stale, but if she opened the window tomorrow, that would be all right soon enough. For a hundred pounds, she could imagine staying in far worse places.
There was gas lighting too, she found when she examined the lamp on the wall. MacAlasdair, or more likely his father, wasn’t far behind the times when it came to modern comforts. She wouldn’t have expected it from creatures who lived…however long they lived.
Mina shivered at the thought. It was an important thought, though, and an important thing to remember. However human MacAlasdair seemed—however handsome she thought he was, at odd moments when he stopped being aggravating—he wasn’t human at all. He didn’t live like one; he didn’t die like one, or at least not at the same rate; and he might well not think like one.
And the man who opposed him had been human once but was clearly willing to deal with creatures who were anything but.
Mina wrapped her arms around herself and eyed the corners of the room, the shadows that fell from the bed and the writing desk. They didn’t move. Anything hunting MacAlasdair would hardly start up here.
All the same, after she undressed, she got into bed with the light still on. She could sleep in almost any conditions, and MacAlasdair could damn well foot the extra bill.
***
Mina woke to clear light, a pair of starlings fighting somewhere near her window, and an immediate sense of unreality. Shadow men.Dragonmen, for God’s sake. If she hadn’t been in an attic room in a strange mansion, she would have dismissed the whole affair as a dream and cautioned herself against whatever she’d had for supper.
The thought of supper brought on an immediate and most worldly hunger. She washed and dressed in a hurry, though she was careful to look respectable, coiling her hair tightly back and pinning her collar very straight. Word got around quickly; Polly wouldn’t be the only one with questions.
